


Can’t Sleep in the City of Neon and Chrome

by DesireeArmfeldt



Series: I Have to Go Out Tonight [1]
Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Clubbing, Friendship, Loneliness, M/M, POV Third Person Limited, Pining, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-06
Updated: 2012-06-06
Packaged: 2017-11-07 02:20:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/425819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a ds-kinkmeme prompt by helens78: due South, Fraser/OMC, public sex/clubbing -- Fraser goes out to clubs in order to get all the things he doesn't think he can have in "real life".  </p><p>Not very explicit about the sex, though, as it turns out (nor all that public).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can’t Sleep in the City of Neon and Chrome

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Out Tonight" from _Rent_

Ray Kowalski would be astonished if he knew where Fraser is and what he’s doing just now.

 

Well, to be fair, every single person who has ever known Fraser would be astonished to see him in his present circumstances.  Even Victoria, who knew Fraser as a man capable of both feeling and embracing sexual desire.  But Ray would be particularly surprised, Fraser thinks, because it was Ray who introduced him to the territory he now inhabits.

 

Ray explained the club scene to Fraser apropos of an investigation, of course, the way Ray—and Ray Vecchio before him—introduced Fraser to a variety of Chicago’s multitudinous sub-cultures.  Ray laughed at Fraser’s embarrassment and teased him that he’d better not try dancing or his stiffness would give him away as an interloper, even more so than his refusal to drink anything harder than ginger ale.  Ray watched Fraser’s back, ready to come to his rescue if anyone attempted to engage him in an overly embarrassing or unwelcome interaction.  And Ray moved among the frenetic, lustful, beautiful young (and not-so-young) men like a wave cresting through the ocean.  As if he belonged among them.  This was familiar territory to Ray, that much was clear.  The men opened up their arms to Ray’s inviting smile and panther-like grace.  The ocean threatened to absorb him—but Ray was on the job and Fraser was watching his back, and the offers slid past him harmlessly, ‘no harm, no foul,’ as Ray might say.  To Fraser, watching him, a universe of dizzying possibility was revealed.

 

They solved the case and moved on to others, and the topic of men’s nightclubs never came up in conversation between them.  Nor did the inferences about Ray that Ray must have guessed Fraser would make.  Life went on as usual, and if Fraser had filed away some other data from the whole experience, he certainly never mentioned that to Ray, either.

 

He has also never mentioned—not to Ray, and not to Ray Vecchio or anyone else, either—how unbearably lonely he finds life, sometimes.  More often, now that Ray and Ray have found happiness together in a romantic partnership that Fraser (mortifyingly) had not seen coming until it struck him across the face.

 

He is happy for his friends; truly, he is.  And he is grateful (more deeply than he dares admit to them) for the fact that their liaison has not weakened the friendship and loyalty each of the Rays feels toward Fraser.

 

But there are only so many nights he can lie on his cot alone, knowing that the two people he loves best in the world are safe and happy in each other’s arms.  So, Fraser has found an alternative in the deafening music and strobing lights and fierce male sweat of gay nightclubs.

 

He doesn’t go as himself.  For one thing, it would be counterproductive—as Ray pointed out all those months ago—to come to such a place in a flannel shirt and hiking boots, with his public smile and his distancing courtesy.  For another thing. . .he comes here to be other than himself, or at least, some version of himself that he has never allowed to develop.  A Benton Fraser from some alternate universe who chose some path other than following his father’s footsteps into the RCMP, who developed other ways of resisting life’s endless attempts to wear away the human soul.

 

A Benton Fraser who wears black jeans and a tight white tank top, with his hair tousled and no hat in sight.  One who dances with abandon and returns the fox-sharp smiles of the pretty young men who surround him.

 

A Benton Fraser who revels in the hands of strangers on his arms, chest, face. . .ass.  Who exchanges kisses on the dance floor and blowjobs in the men’s room or the backseats of other men’s cars.  Though he still doesn’t drink alcohol—he’s not looking to blunt his senses, and he doesn’t need it to loosen his self-control.  He can leave that behind, just by walking into this place, in these clothes and this name that are not the ones he wears in real life. This place, where people recognize him not as The Mountie, not as Fraser, not even as Ben, but as one of themselves.

 

Once in a while, he even goes home with someone (though he never invites anyone to his own home).  He chooses carefully, and all his partners so far have been kind and relatively honest and as desperate with lust as he is.  He is desperate with so much more than lust, and perhaps they are as well, but so far these trysts have never passed beyond camaraderie and the slaking of physical desire.  No one has ever asked him to stay the night, nor has he ever regretted walking home in the small hours of the morning to his empty apartment to begin the ritual of transforming back into his daylight self.

 

But he returns to the clubs, a sleepwalking princess in her ballgown descending the secret stair into the Underworld to dance until dawn claims her from the dream with her shoes in tatters.  He returns to kiss and to dance; to share touch and laughter and desire.  Most of all, he returns because he can no longer bear not to hope.  Each new eye that catches his might be the one that could look at his daylight self without disgust.  Each new hand that touches his might be the one that holds on forever.


End file.
